style.com: Luca Luca Spring 2009 Ready-to-Wear

Luca Lucasee the complete collection ›
NEW YORK, September 8, 2008By Alison Baenen
For his first complete collection at the helm of Luca Luca, Raul Melgoza looked more to the future—sometimes in an eighties Blade Runner kind of way—than the past, which meant fewer easily wearable pieces than the Luca customer (Ivana Trump, Tinsley Mortimer, et al.) might be used to. Melgoza clearly wants to push the label in a more sportswear-driven direction. That, coupled with the designer’s architectural bent, resulted in a sculpted silhouette in a clean, practically all-white palette. In fact, there was nary a print nor embellishment in sight. Vents, panels, and slits—notably, in a lovely liquid-silver gown at the show’s end—added interest to basic shapes. A few pretty lunch-to-cocktail dresses had the illusion of being more than one piece, and appeared in places to float off the body. Occasionally, though, Melgoza pushed things too far: Strange, space-age pod shoes gave the girls some trouble—Hye Park went ahead and took hers off—and a few looks fell on the wrong end of the sci-fi spectrum.